)+( Asshole Kicker's Gang )+(

Welcome to another edition of The Tube.  Today, instead of talking about what TV shows you should watch, I want to go all “meta” on you.  Let’s talk media servers and set-top boxes.

One of the biggest media boxes you can get is the Boxee Box, sold by shit-meisters D-Link.  Now, ordinarily I would steer far fucking clear of anyting with D-Stink’s logo on it, but the Boxee is different.  It is actually a good device, in general, unlike D-Stink’s shitty routers.

But some history.  The Boxee Box is not an original work.  It is forked from the venerable XBMC project.  XBMC means X-Box Media Centre, and so it was…a media centre hacked onto the original X-Box.  It evolved wildly since then and now exists everywhere, even on Android.  But Boxee forked it and basically went their own way, putting it on proprietary hardware.

The Box itself is a cool cube that sits on a 45 degree angle.  It looks slick.  It comes with a simple remote that flips over to have a full thumb keyboard, all over wireless.

Pros:  It plays pretty much anything.  You can plug an external drive of any kind (USB thumb drive, whatever) and use it as a media source.  It comes with  a shitload of apps, like Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo.  On the down side…most of the other apps are crap.  Vimeo rebuffers constantly.  Youtube works good though, and it is a really good Netflix device.

And here’s where the Boxee fails.  It fails not because of it’s potential, it fails because of it’s creators.  The people behind the Boxee are fucking asshats, all of them.

See, fans of XBMC bought into the Boxee for years…created apps, addons and whatnot..only to have the Boxee assholes push out updates that locked them out more and more.

And that’s only the start.  The Boxee people promised regular updates to the Box..they lied.  The updates have been few and far between.  And many bugs remain unfixed, many apps broken (like Vimeo).

And to top it off, the Boxee people gave Boxee owners the big “fuck you” by cutting us all loose..they said we’d be getting the “final update” for the Boxee back in November.  Why?  Because they were pushing their inane follow-up to the Boxee Box called “Boxee TV”…a crappy internet-based PVR that limits everything that made the Boxee great.

Boxee TV is a failure..it doesn’t work.  It has been getting crap reviews for months now.  And yet they decided the original Box is at the end of the line.  AND THEY DIDN’T EVEN GIVE US THE FINAL UPDATE…apps are broken, FLASH is fucking broken, and they continue to piss away everything on the lame duck called “Boxee TV”.

So where am I going with this?  First, don’t be suckered into buying a Boxee Box…they’re flushing the stock.  AVOID fucking Boxee TV.

If you want a media server, look for something Android based.  I have XBMC running on my Android tablet and it blows the doors off the fucking Boxee Box.

XBMC on Android is the future…Fuck the Boxee people.